Lessons From Anxiety
Speaker 0: A lot of times people act like I have everything all figured out, you know, because it's my job to help other people figure their stuff out. But the truth is, I'm just like you. Totally normal, really flawed, and taking my lessons along the way. One of the biggest journeys of my life was finding my way out of anxiety. Today's episode is for every person who sometimes feels like life will be just like this forever.
You can find your way out to my friend That's why I'm here. Stick around and I'll tell you a little story about bravery, hope, and tenacity. Thanks for listening to Takeout Therapy. A podcast for people who are trying to be their best themselves, but maybe need a little more information about it all. I'm Rebecca Hunter, a therapist and anxiety specialist dolling out the information.
Latest research, and of course, a little advice here and there. If you've got less than twenty minutes and a good sense of humor, You will find this discussion helpful. This isn't therapy. It's self help. At its finest, let's get to work.
Hello, friend. Thanks for stopping in and listening today. I just want to say something quick today before I get going. And it's a little bit about mental health stigma. So a lot of people feel really bad about feeling bad.
They don't want anybody to know that they're not quote unquote okay. They don't want to ask for help. And I just want to say very clearly that this is a problem. This is mental health stigma. When we can't be upfront about mental health staff, we suffer for much longer periods of time and use all kinds of interventions that don't really solve the problem.
And I get it. That was me when I had anxiety. We just wanna be able to deal with stuff on our own. We certainly don't wanna burden anyone else, and so we just try. We just try to feel better.
You know, the reason I wanted to bring up that this is mental health stigma is because for you or for anybody that you know, we can just kind of like ask for help and feel supported and talk about these things. That's how we're gonna change the course of things. Today's episode is a glimpse behind the door to my earlier struggles with my mental health. If I could have known at twenty eight, what I now know at forty eight, Oh, my friend, I could have saved myself a ton of struggle and so much time. So today, Maybe I can save you some struggle by telling you what I know now that I wish I had known then.
How would that be? I'll save you some time and some angst. If I could go back, the most important thing I would tell myself is You don't know what you don't know girl. Stop acting like you know everything. Get curious and learn some things.
I was raised in anxiety and alcoholism. An environment of disempowerment. My mom was a very victimized person. She was at life's mercy. And did not make a ton of moves to get out from under at all.
And so this was my upbringing. I think my nervous system was pretty jacked up from the very beginning because we had a really chaotic life. We moved around a lot, never situated for very long in one place. And, frankly, that's just a law for a little kid. Right?
An unstable home life is one thing, but the constantly changing landscape was another stress as well. So needless to say, I was an anxious kid who turned into an anxious young adult. I never really believe things could be different for me, which is so interesting just to even say that out loud now. Inxiety was a total household baseline. And I just fell right in.
It was really natural for me And if you've been raised by anxious people, you're totally going, yeah, I totally understand what you're saying right now, Rebekah. And so I just lived there in anxiety, working my life around the anxiety. And one example is that I was always a really under confident student which I just gave you a little bit of my history and that will pretty much explain it. Right? I never really learned to learn.
With all of the changes in my childhood. There was not really any support at home. So by the time I finished high school. I was kinda done with it all. I was like a straight c student with no plans to conquer the world.
No school. Completely exacerbated my anxiety, and so I just avoided it altogether. But then I went to college anyway. Because my parents seemed to want that for me and my friends were all going, not because I thought it was a good choice for me. It totally wasn't.
But I was so under prepared. I ended up flunking out that first time around. It didn't take me long. My GPA was actually a one nine Thank you very much. My study habits were terrible.
Things got really hard academically, and my anxiety just shut me down completely. So instead of dealing with the anxiety, I left school. Rather than look at the anxiety as something to solve, I looked to my life and rearranged it again and again and again around the anxiety. I made a ton of room for it to grow and flourish and really run things, you know? And it did.
A lot of people do this when it comes to mental health in general, and I would argue that this is definitely not the best route. So learn some things. Your relationship is not well. Okay? Pick up a book or listen to a podcast, get some information from a relationship.
Expert. You maybe don't know everything about how to conduct a healthy relationship. I know I didn't. You're feeling totally burned out, Maybe learn some stuff about the body and the mind and how burnout, how it happens in order to, like, reduce its impact on you. In your work life, in your relationships.
Right? You don't know what you don't know. Be curious about solutions. Not over accommodating of problems. That was one thing that I really wished I would have known early on.
Another thing I would have told myself is get connected to yourself, friend, I was totally a brain on a stick back then. If you would have told me to get connected to myself, it would have laughed in your face. I didn't even know what that meant. I do now. In anxiety or depression or despair or confusion when we're really struggling with anything.
It is so easy to lose sight of ourselves. I was kind of taught to be anxious and I was also taught to really criticize myself a lot, whether for the anxiety or everything else. So I was good at that. And it's hard to move forward when you're in this constant battle with yourself. I really felt like I wanted to feel better, but I didn't really wanna do anything differently, which I think is something that a lot of people go through, and it's very hard.
I didn't really even understand the idea of resonance. I was very unaware of myself, resonance. It's like you know, that amazing feeling that happens when something is a yes, I didn't really even understand what that meant. That's how out of touch with myself. I was.
I didn't know when things were right for me in terms of my mental health, or relationships or anything else and when things were, like, totally off. I remember going to a therapist right after my youngest son was born. She listened to my whole spiel about my anxiety and how I just could not manage to do everything and this is how it was and there was nothing she could do for me. I've been doing this spiel for years. I had just had two kids in sixteen months and, oh my, I was doing a lot.
My this therapist asked me to do this very simple exercise. And it was to write down everything that I actually did in the course of twenty four hours, like every single action I took for an entire day. Yeah. So did I mention an infant and a toddler at the time? This simple exercise totally opened my eyes to all of the things I was doing.
I had no idea. I was running around on in survival mode. On autopilot, making baby food and washing cloth diapers, I was, like, killing my to be the perfect mother and wife. But I was too busy, like, ragging on myself and criticizing what I hadn't done and talking about how crappy I felt all the time to even notice. It was like I was nowhere to be found.
So I started to slowly introduce myself to myself. Hi there, lady who vacuums. Every single day. Why exactly are you doing that? Is it a nonnegotiable?
What would you like to do instead what might feel better or more fun or more revitalizing to you. Do you wanna make homemade baby food? And if so, is it fun for you? This was a time in my life where I started a serious bit of relationship building with myself. Years later, I learned through my work about self compassion, and everything completely clicked for me.
Like, I had to make room in my life for myself. Always. No exceptions. So there has to be a relationship there. And I know you're working on this too, or you wouldn't be listening to this podcast.
So yay, Keep building and strengthening that relationship you have with yourself. Stop being self critical and so jiggy of you. You heard last week's episode. Right? It will help you feel better to have your own back no matter what you're struggling with.
Okay. And last thing I would tell my younger self is just to show up and be brave. Oh, is that all easy enough? No. Not easy.
Hard. When we're struggling with our mental health, the brain gets very overactive. It's very confusing. Because even though we may physically be okay, the body thinks we're in distress and so it responds accordingly. In my story, of my anxiety.
I was totally living in my head. Lots of thinking, lots of physical symptoms started showing up. I was always sick in the mornings. By lunchtime, I was convinced I was actually ill and would have to leave work at times. You know, I couldn't just show up.
Like, be present in my environment, get into my breath and my body and do some releasing of control. No. No. No. No.
I could not show up and be brave like that. And my resistance to doing that kind of work wasted a lot of time, frankly. Because instead of showing up, I just waited to get help. I waited until my anxiety was affecting my ability to be the kind of parents I wanted to be. I waited until my relationship was exhausting and completely over underwhelming.
And overwhelming. I waited until I was waiting until I felt brave enough and you know what? I never really did. At some point, I just started to jump in. I stopped waiting and decided just to breed brave.
I appreciated Bernae Brown's work and Cheryl Strades work at that point in my life because that was some empowering fact based literature. Real stories of scared people like me getting brave and showing up. Yeah. Perfect. Getting brave enough to do some healing work is one thing, but being willing to show the heck up was the other ingredient.
And what I mean by that is very literally learning to show up, to observe my mind my behavior, my thoughts, and be curious about how change could start to look, showing up in my body with healing breath, or even like a couple hands on my heart was a huge move for me. Just learning to be present. Wow. A total game changer. So because I grew up in an environment where I was constantly watching the people around me try to figure out what the heck was gonna happen next.
Right? It didn't feel emotionally safe, and I was not taught presence. I was on high alert from the time I was a kid until I hit my thirties. So that's not being present. Being willing to like take a step back Take some deep breaths.
Look at the sky or the flowers being willing to just stop and smell a cookie. Those were things I never learned. And once I did, they were they became life changing tools for me. I consider myself completely healed from an anxiety disorder as you've heard me say. But what that means to me is really important.
By being willing to learn about what the heck was going on with my brain and body by connecting to myself in a nice relationship and by being brave and showing up I've healed, which was what what was once a pretty disrupted condition. And by heeding my advice to myself, in your life? Maybe you can feel a lot better too. If there's anything I've learned in my own journey and by working with so many people over the years is that this journey, it's mine. It's mine to decide.
It is mine to change patterns, to heal family wounds. This life, it's mine, to shape and move in whatever direction suits me. In your life, well, it's right there waiting for a friend. Thanks for being brave and showing up today. Take what you've learned and pass it along to another person.
Maybe even leave a review of the podcast so more people will find it. Right? Text an episode to a struggling friend. Let's just keep doing the work. I'm right here with you.
I'm doing my work too. A quick announcement before I sign off today. I have open registration for stressed relief week. It's a week long series of videos where I'm gonna teach you to feel better. That's pretty straightforward.
You can just register on my web site, rebekah hunter m s w dot com. I'll send you links to the videos every day or you can watch them on social media. If you register, you'll get the whole series E and the workbook. I hope you join me and bring a friend or two. I think online events can be incredibly helpful right now.
I'm going to teach you a lot as usual. And lastly, enrollment for back to calm My self help program for stress overwhelm and anxiety will be opening in October again. So if you're a high functioning but kind of tweaked person right now, this program promises to bring emotional peace through empowerment and action taking. I developed it using evidence based therapy practices that get people feeling better pretty darn fast, to be honest, because not all healing happens in an office. It starts with you, my friend.
Thanks for being here. Okay. I hope you found today's episode helpful. Here's the deal. I'd like to get rid of some of the stigma around mental health, and this is how I'm doing You can join me by leaving a review, sending an episode along to a struggling friend or even subscribing.
Any of those choices would be so exciting, my friend, because then you and I, we would be helping more people. Let's do that. If you wanna work with me, visit me at rebekah hunter m s w dot com, and you can see all the fun things I'm up Don't forget, I'm an anxiety specialist. So if that's your jam, it's my jam too. Way to show up today.
